A translation of "Mocidade e Morte" by famed Portuguese Romanticist poet, Alexandre Herculano. The rhyme of the original is conserved. The original heroic and sapphic decasyllabic meter was worked into a (predominantly) iambic pentameter.

A body raised up and my eyes both fixed,
My slender hands outspread across my chest,
And look so young, a misery’s sentry,
At the midpoint of an uneasy rest.

Across those pale and hollow cheeks of mine,
As those my tears come falling back to back;
And feel my pulse’s thump, a breakneck beat,
It tries to match heart’s time but loses track.

Disease disseminates in feeble veins;
Brow wet with cold sweat, somber distress call;
Pain gnaws and eats away my haggard form,
In reply to my sudden headlong fall.

Rest my hand on my forehead burning hot,
I stare, eyes wet from weeping all night long
At the lonely lamp hanging overhead,
And there, by myself, I compose a song.

Will it be a hymn of love and of hope?
A prayer of longing and an anguished cry?
Resigned to pain does it instead greet death,
Or blaspheme angry curses to the sky?

It is just that, the quick approaching fall
Of a fevered delirious ill mind
That swings madly to the edge of the grave,
But swings back after all respite declined.

It’s verse murmuring to this, my poor soul,
A lyre’s final note whose time is due;
It’s the groaning of a falling pine tree;
It is the dying troubadour’s adieu.